Life Imitating Life

By Greg Boustead / January 28, 2010

Life, as the expression goes, isn’t always pretty. And this is typically true all the way down to the microscopic level. But with a few tricks of the lab, life in its simplest, single-celled forms—bacteria, yeast, fungi, protists—can be precisely manipulated into a thing of preternatural beauty. The practice of making art from microbes isn’t new—Sir Alexander Fleming, the father of penicillin, used pigments from living bacteria to create elaborate paintings in the early 1900s. But the aesthetic side-projects of today’s researchers-cum-artists are becoming increasingly more experimental and radical. Advancements in biotechnology are broadening nature’s palette with new colors, florescence, and media. As part of this movement, evolutionary biologist T. Ryan Gregory collaborated with Niall Hamilton, an industrial biologist who has been making colorful images with bacteria and fungi since 2003, and microbialart.com was born. The site acts as a repository to capture a growing number of ephemeral pieces—living works, which ultimately overgrow their desired forms and die. “One can put significant effort into creating a piece, only to destroy it a few days later,” says Gregory. “It’s both amazing and tragic in a very intriguing way.”

The primitive life forms compete for the light source. The resulting images are haunting and temporary: the medium breaks down as CO2 is converted into oxygen. Darwinian concepts of competition, evolution, and origins inspired Boafo’s series.

A still from a project inspired by the character Ophelia from Shakespeare’s Hamlet: Growing, shifting bacteria filmed in Petri dishes by the artist JoWonder animate what will ultimately be a video installation. Chromobacterium violaceum, a bacterium that inhibits the growth of other bacteria, was used to shape the “painting.” The Surrey University molecular biologist Simon Park collaborated, with funding provided by The Wellcome Trust.